David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH)

I can actually understand all of Hay.

Both of those systems are just over 100,000 lines of code.

I've seen people do this at maybe twice, maybe three times that scale, and then it starts breaking down.

Once you get north of certainly half a million lines of code, no individual human can do it, and that's when you get into maybe some degree of microservices can make sense.

100,000 lines of code.

It is.

Considering the fact that Basecamp, I think, has something like 420 screens, different ways and configurations.

Do you include the front end in that?

No, that's the Ruby code.

Well, it's front-end in the sense that some of that Ruby code is beneficial to the front-end, but it's not JavaScript, for example.

Now, the other thing we might talk about later is we write very little JavaScript, actually, for all of our applications.

Hay, which is a Gmail competitor, Gmail ships, I think, 28 megabytes of uncompressed JavaScript.

If you compress it, I think it's about 6 megabytes, 28 megabytes.

Think about how many lines of code that is.

When Hay launched, we shipped 40 kilobytes.

It's trying to solve the same problem.

You can solve the email client problem with either 28 megabytes of uncompressed JavaScript or with 40 kilobytes if you do things differently.

But that comes to the same problem, essentially.

This is why I have fiercely fought splitting front-end and back-end apart.

That, in my opinion, this was one of the great crimes against web development.